I was told that the heavy holiday season starts the last week of July and goes until the third week of August. If that is the case, which it appears to be – I don’t like it.

Currently with how things are looking for my earnings for the month it is looking like I might hit 1/3 of what I normally do. That is not cool, but, if this is the normal slow period then its not to bad at all cause I am still going to hit the minimum amount I need to make per month.

What Have I Been Doing In My Slow Time?

I have been studying Media Buying and researching the heck out of it. Media Buying is ultimately what I want to be doing as the rewards are just huge, the risks are huge as well but it will be worth it in the long run.

So with that, I am back to the grind stone updating sites and studying!

From now until the end of June, you could be one of the lucky winner’s of the latest Bidz contest being help over at Direct Agents.

You’ve got from May 1^st to June 30^th to prove it! Entry into this contest is very simple, all you have to do is generate the most leads for Bidz.com – and you win! Below is the prize list and what you have to get in leads to be able to win this contest and meet all of the important affiliate marketers at Affiliate Summit in NYC.

1^st prize: (5,000 leads)

The first prize package will consist of:

• Round Trip Tickets to Affiliate Summit East for four days, three nights.

• Platinum Pass to Affiliate Summit.

• Driver pick-up to and from the airport.

• Three night hotel stay at Hilton N.Y.

2^nd prize: (1,500 lead minimum)

• Gold Pass to Affiliate Summit East

• Dinner for two at NYC restaurant of choice.

3^rd prize: (750 lead minimum)

• Gold Affiliate Summit East Pass

Honorable Mention: (200 lead minimum):

• 2 Affiliate Summit East Prize Giveaways

*Contest applies to all Bidz Short Form Lead campaigns. See Terms and Conditions.

Click here NOW to Sign Up with Direct Agents and Enter this Great Contest!

Please let me know, if you can and ASAP!

Thanks

Even though my grammar skills are not the best and sometimes I don’t catch mis-spelled words (which is odd because I have two different spell checkers going) I personally feel my writing skills are way better then most article writers that are out there. Let me explain!

To my understanding most article writers you can hire for cheap from places like eLance are mostly from different countries who’s primary language is not English. When I have a new site to build I use a tool I have called Market Samurai to find keyword related articles online. It’s mostly how I do my topic research.

What this tool does is it searches through the most popular article directories and brings back a list of articles that are related to your search. Makes it very easy and fast to find content – seconds really!

In a lot of cases all I have to do (if I wanted to) is just re-write most of the articles and put them into better English and I am done – a unique article made.

What dose this tell me?

What that tells me is most of the content writers or article writers that are out there are not worth much at all. If you have to pay someone to write an article for you and it is not in proper English – then they are not worth what you are paying them to do.

If content is King don’t you think the King of your own country you live in (or the targeted country you are promoting offers in) should be able to understand the article?

So, I have decided to pull the EntreCard widget from my site forever. In order to get any amount of traffic from them you need to spend hours and hours to build up credits. Those hours I need else where, and if that is the case then why bother having there widget on my site at all.

Sorry EntreCard, maybe next time!

There was around 8 to 10 2nd place winner’s – one from each blog that ran the contest, and then 3 out of those finalist were chosen who had the best affiliate marketing tips.

Here is my list of prizes I won just for giving out some affiliate marketing tips that I personally know work for making money online.

Prizes

1 – iPod Nano

2 – $100.00 Amex Gift Card

3 – $50.00 iTunes gift card 9 to load up the Nano with

4 – Market Leverage t-shirt

And the last prize which is my favorite prize out of all of them is the amazing Amazon Kindle. In case you never heard of this before, it is an amazing little device that allows me to download almost any book that has been made in less then 60 seconds, plus news articles from almost every paper in north America (could be the world actually).

The Kindles were sold out a few weeks back due to Chirstmas and eveything and Oprah featuring it on her show. Which I amsure helped increase sales a ton too.

Here is a snap shot of the Kindle.

Above all the prizes I just won totallying a value of around $750.00 there was one thing I wanted to see happen over everything else.

I want to see someone make some money with the tip I gave for the contest. To me, that means more then what I just won. I have said it before and I will say it again. With all the area’s a person can make money online there is no reason at all for people to hoard the knowledge.

With that, I want to thank Market Leverage for having this contest again and for John Chow hosting it.

Great job sharing tips by all the people who did enter.

After I went through and picked all my keywords and wrote my ad copy I set my daily budget to $10.00. I know, your thinking that is kind of low ain’t you. Well, I usually start my campaigns off low then move them up over time so I don’t end up wasting a bunch of cash if the offer turns out to be a flop, also I am going to be focusing on a different method of buying traffic starting the first week in January so this campaign is more of me just playing around then anything else.

Ok, so the campaign went live and a few hours later I went to check it, to make sure it was running. When I opened up my Adwords Account I seen that I had spent $18.00 all ready. That is 8 dollars higher then my daily budget of $10. I was like WTF!

In some ppc campaigns you run, depending on the keywords you use, Google cannot turn your campaign off fast enough. When this happens your budget gets blown. It’s not a bug or anything, it just means you are getting lots of clicks fast and by the time Adwords notices that your over your budget, you may way over!

I just wanted to point this out to your guys in case it ever happens to you when you set up a PPC Campaign and to alert you to the fact that it can happen.

So my test was to see how well the offer converted and over of 13 clicks yesterday which cost me $18.00, the offer converted twice. The payout I get for a conversation on that offer I am running is $35.00. 2 conversations = $70.00 and a net profit of $52.00.

Not bad eh for a few hours work!!

I truly hope every single one of my readers and visitors has a great holiday season. That you and your family’s are safe and healthy, and your children (if you have any) are still excited to see what Santa brings them.

My son is 8 and he still believes in Santa a bit, I think! I know he suspects there is not a real Santa but I refuse to let go of the fact that there is one. Christmas changes to much for a kid once they stop believing, so the longer I can keep that going for Devin, the better memories he is going to have when he has is own family one day.

There are so many different beliefs for so many different topics now a days I don’t see there being anything wrong with believing in the man from the north pole. Do you?

Ultimately, Christmas should be a time for family and friends to gather and be happy just being with each other, but most of all, for me, its the glow in the eye’s of the people I spend my holidays with when they see what Santa has brought for them.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

The one thing I have noticed about building sites for a PPC Campaign versus building a new Pepperjam Store is there is a lot less work building the stores. In PPC you need to focus a lot on the structure of your articles to help lower the costs of paying for clicks.

When I build a new Pepperjam store I only focus on my keywords to help draw in traffic from search engines and target certain keyword phrases. I know this is almost the same thing but when you don’t have to worry about paying for traffic, it is a lot less of a load on you when your building the site.

I have a few domains I am going to be putting new stores onto as I have noticed there has been a drastic increase in the amount of opportunities from he Pepperjam Network to work with now. If you have not checked out the store builder system in a while you might want to go have a look.

Netshops has over 74000 products listed in the store builder system so I am sure you can find a few dozen niches there you can work with. One of the product lines carried by Netshops is what my next store will be about.

If your thinking that the shopping season is over and that a store would not be the best thing to build at this point in time, your wrong! If I could turn back the clock I would of been a lot better prepared for this holiday season if I would of had my stores built last year. Remember, with time comes rank and traffic. Being ready for next season is something I will working on right inside the new year.

I did have a few problems with my upgrade. I don’t think it is the fault of wordpress 2.7 either. I had a few plug in’s I had to remove as they were causing major data base issues. My data base has been the bane of my existence with my server upgrade too.

The first plug in I removed was the wp-sticky post plugin. Why? Well, the sticky post feature is now built into wordpress. Cool eh!

The second plugin I had to remove was the rating plugin I had going. It was causing some major ass data base issues for me, so it had to go. I didn’t have it very long so that’s ok.

One thing about installing plugins now is, you no longer have to leave your site to install new one. You can do it all right from the plug in page f your dash board.

If you have not downloaded and installed wordpress 2.7, go for it, you’re going to love it!